The Deadhouse (3 page)

Grand old apartment houses lined up along Riverside Drive, to our
east, and Mike took the Ninety-sixth Street exit to wind his way up the
quiet streets till we saw the array of NYPD cars and trucks that
blanketed the intersection and rested on the snowy slopes of the park
entrance opposite Lola's building. "Must be the place, kid."

Two uniformed cops were stationed on either side of the front door,
and one nodded at Mike as he flashed his badge and asked the way down
to the basement. "Press hasn't crawled all over this yet?" he asked,
puzzled by the lack of interest from the media.

"Been and gone," the younger guy answered, jiggling one foot at a
time and flexing his fingers, trying to keep warm. "They pulled out
after a few shots of the body bag."

"Is there a doorman?"

"Not all day. Just came on at midnight. The entrance is only covered
from twelve till eight A.M. And I think we're cramping this guy's style
already. He likes to hang on to his flask pretty tight, and he's really
spooked out by this. You gotta use the stairs or the north elevator to
get down to where they found her. The south car has been shut off
altogether. That's where the body was."

A couple in formal dress glanced at the police officers and brushed
past Chapman on their way inside. They were still in the rear of the
lobby as we entered, standing in the recessed area off to the right, by
the mailboxes, trying to find out from the confused doorman what the
commotion was about. Two elderly women in flannel bathrobes and one
grad student type with purple-streaked hair had beaten them to the old
guy for a chat, and I expected that by dawn, most of the tenants would
have some version of a rumor from one of these sources.

Chapman pulled open the heavy service door that led to the fire
stairs. There was no lightbulb at the top of the landing, and I
followed him slowly down the two flights of steps.

Lieutenant Peterson was sitting at a bare desk in what I assumed was
the super's office at the foot of the staircase. His cigarette dangled
from his lips as he clutched the phone receiver with one hand and held
up his other in our direction, palm outward, signaling Chapman to be
quiet.

When he finished the conversation, he rose to his feet to greet us.
"Alexandra, how've you been? That was the deputy commissioner, Mike.
Can I talk to you alone for a minute?"

"Jeez, and I brought Sonja Henie all the way up here just to see
you, Loo."

Peterson wasn't amused. He motioned Mike into the small room and
closed the door. I turned the corner and said hello to the rest of the
team from the Homicide Squad. Four of them were standing in front of
the open space of the elevator shaft, and the bottom of the deadly cab
was posed eerily above their heads and behind them, like a huge weight
ready to drop again. They were talking about the squad's Christmas
party, planned for the next evening, with no mention of the gruesome
death that had brought them to this filthy room.

"You in on the pool?" Hector Corrado asked me.

"Only if you make sure I don't win. Battaglia thinks it's in such
bad taste that we shouldn't humor you guys by chipping in."

"Pick a number, Alex. It'll only run you twenty bucks, and it's a
big pot this year. You wanna lose, go low. Man, things always get crazy
around the holidays, and this one's starting off wild. You're too young
to remember, but it's beginning to look like the eighties around here."

Homicide cops had a tradition of betting on the number of murder
cases they expected to occur before the end of the year. Hector kept
track of the field, since choices had to be made by late summer. If
there were open slots left, prosecutors were invited to kick in before
the night of the party.

"So far, we've only had three hundred sixty-two in Manhattan this
year. I just missed by six bodies back in eighty-eight. Total was seven
sixty-four, can you believe it? And these wimps think they're
overworked now when they're carrying a handful of investigations."

Chapman had left his overcoat in the super's office and emerged
holding an oversize flashlight. He held out his right hand to Hector
and asked the guys if the Crime Scene Unit had finished its work.

"Hard to make this a crime scene. Super was selling it to the first
guys who responded as an accident. Peterson pulled in every chit he
could think of to get Crime Scene to come over and give it a look, sort
of unofficially. They're treating it as a suspicious death, not a
homicide yet. Not every day you get a broad who lays down and rolls out
her front door into an elevator shaft just hours after somebody else
paid a lot of money to have her knocked off," Hector opined. "They took
some photos of the body before she was scooped out. You could look. All
you're gonna see is some dark stains."

Lieutenant Peterson, the veteran detective who ran the Homicide
Squad, could get the Crime Scene Unit to do almost anything he
requested. He had the best instincts in the business when it came to
death investigation, and the finest track record in the department for
solving cases. When he asked for backup, men knew he wouldn't be
wasting their efforts.

Mike squatted and pointed the beam into the dark shaft. I rested one
hand on his shoulder and looked in over his head. "You want to step
aside, blondie? I know you think you give off quite a glow yourself,
but you're blocking the little bit of help that seventy-five-watter is
shining down at me from over your head."

I straightened up and stepped back.

"Hector, anybody get down here and scrape some of this crap up? It's
impossible to tell what's blood and what's oil from the works, just by
looking." Mike was standing, too.

"Yeah, that's all been done."

"They dust for prints?" I asked.

"Nobody even knew what parts of the building to include in the
scene, Alex. We don't know if she had been dead for one hour or four by
the time she was found. In the meantime, one super, two handymen, and a
bunch of teenagers had been all over this area. They didn't know who
she was, so they couldn't figure out which floor she'd dropped from or
which elevator button she'd pushed. Sure, they went up and down all
twenty-two landings, dusting for latents, looking for signs of a
struggle, canvassing to see if anyone was at home who heard any noise.
Pretty futile runaround so far. You go try that other elevator bank.
It's not impossible that she just missed her footing and went off into
a swan dive. You'll see, these things are on their last legs."

"Anyone been inside her apartment yet?"

"Waiting on that now. Peterson sent someone down to the morgue to
get the keys they found on the body. Emergency Services is on their way
back with a ram. Whoever gets here first, that's how we're going in."

"Super doesn't have a key?"

"Nope. She didn't trust nobody with nothin', is what he says."

That would be Lola. Chapman motioned to me to follow him back up the
staircase to the lobby. There was a pair of stuffed armchairs against
the wall, covered in a dreary tapestry fabric, sorely in need of
reupholstering, and we sat opposite each other in them while he told me
about his conversation with the lieutenant.

"Loo's really ripped. The commissioner's sticking with the accident
story. It certainly can't be Ivan who had anything to do with this,
they figure, since he was already under. That's what Peterson took me
inside to tell me. That, and to get you off the premises pronto. If the
mayor says this is an accident, then there's no need to have an
assistant district attorney meddling in it."

For the moment, we both ignored that point. "They never heard of
backup? What if Kralovic didn't trust the guys he hired in Jersey and
wanted a little security, some extra insurance, to make sure his plan
to kill Lola worked?"

"I don't need convincing. City Hall does. The first day of Christmas
my true love gave to me, a shove in the back and a trip to the morgue,
right? The mayor doesn't want to add to the murder tally for the end of
the year. And he's getting additional pressure from the powers that be
at Columbia University."

"But Lola didn't even work there anymore."

"They farmed her out to a new, experimental school—King's College.
It's got an entirely separate administration, but it bought some of the
old Columbia buildings, so it's adjacent to the Columbia-Barnard
campus. Somebody up there's got a direct pipeline to the mayor's
office. The school officials don't want to open the whole can of worms
about the history of their own tortured relationship with Lola Dakota,
so they'd like this shoved under the carpet as well."

"They're leaving out a great big stumbling block, in the oversize
form of the rotund, thick-skulled, and honorable Vinny Sinnelesi, the
Jersey prosecutor who put together this clever sting operation.
Battaglia thinks the entire plan was to snag some visibility to launch
Sinnelesi's bid for the gubernatorial race next year. Vinny had no
qualms about getting attention on the back of Ms. Dakota while she was
alive, so I doubt he'll lose a minute's sleep about doing it over her
dead body."

Mike laughed at my description of Sinnelesi, and at my obvious state
of agitation. "Calm it, Coop."

I was too wound up to stop. "Easy for him to sit tight in his own
little fiefdom and point his fat finger at us, calling this a
murder—whether it is or isn't—knowing he can't screw up
this
investigation
'cause it will be in Battaglia's jurisdiction."

The front door of the building opened and, with the frigid air, in
walked Lieutenant Peterson. Chapman got up and his trademark grin
vanished in a flash. "I thought you'd gone home, Loo."

Without breaking stride as he moved toward the elevator, Peterson
barked back, "I told you to get Ms. Cooper out of this building,
Chapman. She's got nothing further to do with this matter. This, this,
. . . accident."

3

I sat in Chapman's car, shivering against the chill of the night
air, which kept me wide-awake despite the late hour. Peterson's
unexpected reappearance in the lobby had been due to the arrival of the
detective who had been sent to the morgue to fetch Dakota's keys. The
two had crossed paths as Peterson was about to close his car door, so
the lieutenant doubled back to see whether they could gain entry to
Lola's fifteenth-floor apartment. Chapman knew that it wasn't
Peterson's style to examine the woman's home himself. He wasn't a
micromanager in that sense, and would rely on the intelligence of his
men—and the photographs they would bring back—to highlight any
information of significance. "Loo'll give it a once-over just to
satisfy himself, somebody'll snap some pictures, and then I'll come
down to get you," he said as he led me to his car and unlocked the
door. "Just slink down in the seat so he doesn't make you when he's
leaving— no heater, no radio. He'll be gone in twenty minutes."

"You know he'll kill us if we get caught."

"Can't happen, kid. It'll just be you, me, and George Zotos. Who's
gonna squeal?"

Zotos was one of the guys on Mike's team in the squad, and I had
worked well with him over the years. "There's no downside to this for
you. Battaglia doesn't even know you're here, and Peterson gave orders
to me, not to you."

Shortly before one-thirty in the morning, Peterson walked out on the
sidewalk and his driver swung around in front of the building to pick
him up. Ten minutes later, Chapman came out the same way, said
something to the uniformed cops still posted next to the entrance, and
crossed the street to the car to help me maneuver the icy road. We
walked down to 115th Street and into the alley that led to the rear of
the building. The heavy iron door was wedged ajar by the flashlight
that Chapman had been holding earlier. He picked it up from the ground
as he pulled open the door and took me inside through the basement. We
rode to the fifteenth floor on the one elevator that was still in
service, which creaked its way upward, slowly and noisily, then crossed
over to the south side of the building to get to 15A. When Chapman
tapped lightly on the door, Zotos opened it immediately and we joined
him inside the apartment.

Mike passed me a pair of rubber gloves, in exchange for the black
leather pair I'd been wearing all evening. "Don't touch anything
without showing it to me first. Just poke around and see what strikes
you as interesting."

"Some kind of slob, eh?" George was shaking his head, not knowing
where to begin. "You think it was ransacked, or she just liked to live
this way?"

I had been to Lola's office several times to discuss her case and
to try to pressure her supervisors into supporting her during the
process. "I think this is her natural habitat. It's pretty consistent
with what I saw on campus."

We were standing in the living room, which appeared to have been
decorated with the remains of a Salvation Army used-furniture sale. The
classic bones of a prewar six-room apartment were practically obscured
by the bizarre accumulation of odd-shaped chairs, a pair of Victorian
love seats covered in faded burgundy velvet, a beige Naugahyde lounger,
and cardboard boxes piled everywhere, with strapping tape still in
place. Whenever she had moved them in, Lola had not yet opened or
unpacked them.

I walked through the other rooms to get a sense of the layout. The
small kitchen, still decorated in the drab avocado tones of the
sixties, was quite bare, which fit with the fact that she had been
living in New Jersey for almost a month. The dining room featured an
old oak table, pushed up against the window, overlooking a glorious
view of the park and river. It, too, was stacked with boxes, with the
word BOOKS scrawled on the sides of almost every one.

The master bedroom had the same view, outside and within. Here, some
of the cartons had been opened and the volumes were spread around the
floor and partially scattered on shelves.